


Blue on Black

by blackeyedblonde, Blue Snow (kylocatastrophe)



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Child Death, Death from Old Age, Drama, HCRBB, HankCon Reverse Big Bang, M/M, Metaphysical Sex, Moral Ambiguity, Reality Bending, Reapers, Rough Beginnings, Softer Endings, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide Attempt, Wing Kink, Wings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 17:33:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20492609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackeyedblonde/pseuds/blackeyedblonde, https://archiveofourown.org/users/kylocatastrophe/pseuds/Blue%20Snow
Summary: Daylight bounces off the crumpled hood and Hank blinks, so suddenly certain that his brain is misfiring in one last synaptic flare. The man holding Cole’s hand turns to look back at him over one shoulder and reality skews, distorts, and unfurls like a delusion. There are two great wings at his back, blacker than night but shockingly iridescent in the winter sun like they’re dusted with the blue sheen scraped off a fire opal. The feathers ruffle in the wind and Cole’s tiny hand touches one in wonder before he, too, looks back at Hank and smiles.“I love you, daddy,” he says. Hank’s distantly aware that his throat is screaming itself raw but there’s no sound coming out. Maybe he’s gone deaf. Maybe he’s dying. He hopes he is. “Be good, okay?”





	Blue on Black

**Author's Note:**

> Reverse Big Bang Time! This is my collaboration with the extremely talented @rk8inches, whose stunning artwork will blow your damn mind. Here's the link: [❤❤❤](https://twitter.com/rk8inches/status/1168589665349144576)
> 
> I'm still cooking Part 2 of this story but will have it out for you as soon as I can!
> 
> Title is pretty simple and a nod to Connor’s wings, of course, but also the name of a Kenny Wayne Shepherd song from the 90s. Big grimdark moody vibes, babey.

  
  
  
The elementary school had called. Nearly half an hour late picking up Cole after the last bell; Hank had sworn and cursed every passing second on the clock the whole way uptown from the precinct, trying to knock paperwork and fast food wrappers out of the passenger seat while he fought Detroit’s afternoon traffic.

“If this turns into a repeat occurrence we’ll have to call his grandmother and ask her to assume transportation responsibility,” the lady from the office had told him, prim as anything, like she was making it into a challenge—or a threat. _We’ll call the guardian who’s actually **accountable**_ had been the underlying message. “I know you understand the importance of timeliness, Mr. Anderson. It’s not fair to Cole.”

“You sound like a fucking probation officer,” Hank had wanted to say. “Got it,” he‘d said instead through carefully gritted teeth, clenching his phone hard enough to make the plastic case creak. “Sorry for running behind.”

But Cole is all smiles and laughter when Hank rolls up to the curb and gets out to hold open his arms, running so fast his little backpack bounces like a loose turtle shell the whole way. These afternoons after school when he’s not pulling second shift are what Hank lives for. He swings Cole through the air and then holds him close to his chest, waiting while his son turns to wave at the dowdy lady watching them from the school’s office breezeway.

“You have a good day at school, bug?” Hank asks, bundling Cole into the car and buckling his seatbelt. He’s forgotten the damn booster seat again—not that Cole’s a scrawny kid, but he hasn’t hit his growth spurt just yet and it feels shitty to forget it when they make a big show of installing the fucking things at the police department for free.

Cole settles in with his backpack in his lap, little sneakers not quite reaching the floorboard. He fishes what looks like a cheap Happy Meal toy out of an inner pocket and half of a granola bar that immediately crumbles into the seat. Hank sighs and just brushes the crumbs into the floor.

“A man with a spinny light on his head came to talk to us today,” Cole says candidly, sticking the tip of his tongue through the hole where his left front tooth used to be as he squints up at his father. “Can we take the long way home?”

Hank’s been up since the ass crack of dawn but sighs and nods, hanging there in the open door. “Yup,” he says, tightening Cole’s seatbelt one more time for good measure. “We can do whatever you want, boss. Point the way.” 

The sky looks like a piece of dirty slate through the windshield, threatening to snow after the first hard freeze of the season a couple nights ago. Hank shivers in his leather jacket, not quite warm enough to fight off the bitter chill, and heads toward home by way of the old back roads, vaguely distracted by the sound of Cole holding his little toy up to the window and making rocket ship sound effects for it while they drive.

“Dad,” Cole says, still gazing out the window. He has a cowlick on the back of his head, a little swirl that Hank remembers putting the pad of his thumb against ever since Cole was a newborn. He reaches out to touch it now, indulging himself and unable to resist. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

That startles a laugh out of Hank as he lets his hand gently fall away, reaching back over to fuck around with the heater controls on the dash. “I’m already grown up, kiddo,” he says. “I’ve been Lieutenant with the police department for longer than you’ve been alive—you know that.”

“Yeah,” Cole muses, not sounding totally convinced as he turns to look at his father. “But that’s _all_ you wanna be? Not anything else?”

Hank’s brows crawl up his forehead as he swipes a hand down his beard, thinking as oncoming traffic passes on their left. “I’ve never given it much thought, bug,” he says truthfully, and then feels a smile spread across his face when the real answer dawns on him like warm sunlight. “I’m perfectly happy being your dad for the rest of my life. That’s all I want to be when I grow up.”

Cole wrinkles his nose and Hank laughs, deep and warm. “What about you, huh?” he asks, tickling a teasing finger around the shell of Cole’s ear. “You’ve got a whole lot more growing up left to do than your old man.”

The car goes around a slight bend in the road while Cole considers his answer. Light slips across the surface of the pavement like it’s something glassy, and Hank knows the instant they’ve hit black ice but by then it’s already too late.

He jerks the wheel and over-corrects until the steering column locks and they begin to skid. Time moves in strange, stop motion segments, skipping like an old film reel with some of the cells cut out and messily pasted back together. Hank sees headlights from the corner of his right eye and then feels it when his whole body locks and braces for impact. He tries to reach for Cole and watches the Happy Meal toy move through the air like it’d been levitating, suspended in place for a beat while it waits for the car to stop moving.

There’s a crash that Hank feels rather than sees. When his vision comes back into sharpened, oversaturated focus the whole front of the car is crushed and the dash has caved in around them. His legs hurt so fucking bad he can’t even begin to describe the pain—like the whole world is nothing but funneled agony, and it’s only worse when he looks over and sees Cole not moving as a slender hand reaches in through the broken window and gently touches his bloody forehead.

“Hey!” Hank says, voice echoing in his own skull through the fugue of shock, struggling in his seat where he’s trapped beneath the broken steering column. “That’s my boy—that’s my son, Cole, you gotta help him. Call—fuck, _goddamn it_—call 911 and have them ask for Jeff Fowler. Tell him it’s Hank. Tell him…oh Christ, what are you doing?”

Cole rouses and goes willingly into the stranger’s arms like he’d never been trapped in the wreckage at all, like he’s sleepily being carried up to bed. Hank catches sight of dark hair against pale skin, then the warm shard of a brown eye come and gone. The first responder looks like he’s wrapped in a shroud, so dark it swallows light instead of refracting it. The man steps away from the wreck and sets Cole down onto the icy pavement, then leads him further up the bend in the road where another mangled car is steaming.

Daylight bounces off the crumpled hood and Hank blinks, so suddenly certain that his brain is misfiring in one last synaptic flare. The man holding Cole’s hand turns to look back at him over one shoulder and reality skews, distorts, and unfurls like a delusion. There are two great wings at his back, blacker than night but shockingly iridescent in the winter sun like they’re dusted with the blue sheen scraped off a fire opal. The feathers ruffle in the wind and Cole’s tiny hand touches one in wonder before he, too, looks back at Hank and smiles.

“I love you, daddy,” he says. Hank’s distantly aware that his throat is screaming itself raw but there’s no sound coming out. Maybe he’s gone deaf. Maybe he’s dying. He hopes he is. “Be good, okay?”

The winged man holding Cole’s hand doesn’t let go and leans over when Cole tugs at his hand. The six-year-old whispers something into his ear behind a cupped palm, and when the taller figure straightens again he looks sad, in a way, like this isn’t what he wanted. Like he’s got any right to look like a kicked dog when Hank’s the one watching his whole world walk away.

Dark curls sweep across the stranger’s forehead and he’s barefoot on the black ice even though it’s fifteen degrees below freezing. He looks like a painted martyr, in a way, or a transient soul caught between one home in the next. Hank watches in horror as he opens his immense wings wide, then, like a great bird readying itself to take flight—and then snaps them shut with so much power that Hank feels the cold wind on his face through the broken windshield, and just like that Cole’s gone.

Sound returns.

Hank’s not screaming anymore but the car horn is blaring in one unending note, half-crushed under the hood. Cole is in the passenger seat again but he’s not moving. There’s too much blood, on his face and shirt, then on Hank’s hand as he touches his son’s face, afraid to move him much more than that. Sirens start up somewhere in the distance, slow-moving in the evening traffic. It won’t matter anyway.

“Cole,” Hank says, hating the hoarse tremor in his voice, feeling panic drive a spike into the rapid stutter of his heart. He knows his son’s dead, knows it but refuses to believe it. “Cole. Baby—wake up. You gotta wake up. We gotta…oh, _fuck,_ we gotta go home and see Sumo. Don’t you wanna go home and see your puppy?”

It takes nearly an hour for the fire department to cut the car open enough to pull Hank out. They keep a sheet draped over Cole’s body while they work, the white fabric stained through with scarlet, and Hank wishes for death the whole time—wishes the engine will explode and burn him alive, hopes a blood clot will go to his head and kill him in an instant, prays for a meteor to fall out of the sky and smash him into nothing. None of it ever comes. The paramedics simply take him out and set him on a stretcher, trading strange looks with each other when they cut his pants away and find his legs still intact and perfectly whole.

“We all thought you were going to die from blood loss,” one of the younger firefighters says without thinking, like that should’ve been the way this call went. The driver of the car who hit them is sitting on the cold shoulder of the road wearing a shock blanket, head in his hands. Hank doesn’t look at him.

No, Hank only stares up at the lifeless sky even as Captain Fowler himself walks over and stands above the stretcher, a familiar figure there in his peripheral vision. He touches Hank’s hand and pries something from it, gently and then with some difficulty, features stricken despite their usual stoic hardness in the face of tragedy. 

“Hank,” Jeff says, voice just a faint echo in Hank’s conscious mind. “Did you—did you need this? They’re taking you to the hospital now. Oh, my God.”

There’s a blue-black feather as long as his forearm between the Captain’s fingers, slightly crumpled from being held so tightly. Nobody knows how it got there, but then nobody really cares to ask.

Hank shakes his head as the feather falls onto the black ice and he’s loaded into an ambulance. He doesn’t need anything anymore.  
  
  


* * *  
  
  


“It’s a miracle you’re alive, much less still walking,” one of the ER doctors says. She puts Hank through a CAT scan and takes x-rays of him from head to toe before she’s even partially convinced he’s not shattered into a million pieces. He nearly makes it home, fully intending to calmly call somebody to come get Sumo before putting his gun in his mouth, until the trauma surgeon walks in unannounced and says they need to keep him overnight for further observation.

Then, he makes the mistake of saying he wants to die. Maybe it slips out—loudly, in front of the other patients. Maybe he rips the saline drip out of his arm, spraying blood everywhere, and screams in the white sterile hall until two burly transporters and a nurse tackle him to the ground and jab something sharp into his thigh.

Then, he floats.

Then, they take him upstairs to the guarded floor where patients can’t check themselves out.

Then, a couple hours later, Fowler shows up and says it’s okay, that they’re handling it, that he’s been suspended with pay while things get figured out.

“Who had me committed,” Hank rasps. He’s been strapped to the bed with Velcro restraints and his mouth tastes like copper from biting his tongue raw and bloody. “You can’t do this to me, Jeff.”

“It wasn’t me,” Fowler says. He looks like a man walking to the gallows himself. “But I think this was for the best, all things considered. I’m so sorry, Hank.”

When he’s gone and there’s nobody else, Hank stares at the bare, whitewashed wall until movement catches his eye from the doorway. There’s a familiar head of dark hair, watchful eyes he can’t quite make out in the dark. But he knows who it is. The wings are folded at the man’s back but dust the tiled hospital floor behind him, strong legs delicately crossed at the ankle. Casual. Observant.

“You,” Hank says, coughing as bile surges up in the back of his throat like acid. He yanks against the straps binding his wrists and the bed moves an inch across the floor. “You took my _son_.”

Hank screams again and the man is suddenly gone. He screams more and struggles against the restraints until the steel bedrail snaps and breaks, until the nurses come back and push something through his new IV that makes him tumble away into endless blackness tinged a peculiar shade of opalescent blue.  
  
  


*  
  
  


Hank sleeps even when he’s awake.

He dreams about reaching for Cole’s hand across flowing waters. About blood still wet and matted in golden curls. About black feathers scattered on black ice, plucked free like a slaughtered chicken.

The hospital shrink asks him if he dreams, and he tells her no. She doesn’t seem satisfied with that answer but doesn’t argue it, either, as she adds an annotation to her notes. They let him go after a seventy-two hour hold, but Hank doesn’t wake back up for a long time.  
  
  


*  
  


Cole is buried on a Tuesday morning, interred in the empty plot next to his mother nearly three years after she was first put into the ground.

It’s the least Hank can think to do. He doesn’t believe in any God, but he hopes they’re together somehow. It’s a speck of respite in an endless sea of sorrow intent on drowning him.

Hank has become a macabre novelty of sorts, having lived long enough to put both his wife and then his only child in the ground. Most of the mourners watch him instead of the tiny casket being lowered into the plot, eyes wavering between sadness and shame. Hank only gazes at his son’s grave and doesn’t once notice the figure perched on a marble memorial like a carved angel come to life, meticulously sharpening the edge of a sling blade with a whetting stone. It’s not a threat, just another way to busy his hands and pass the time.

The figure watches from a distance, heels pressed back against a forgotten name carved on the tombstone he sits atop. He hunches back further into his cloak of feathers like a mourning shroud, letting them curl around his shoulders in the cold wind, and doesn’t move until the grave is covered with fresh dirt and all the mourners have trickled back to their cars and gone.

Even when the cemetery workers take the canopy and chairs away, Hank sits on the ground by Cole’s headstone, uncaring that the damp grass is ruining his suit. It’s quiet again, save for the morning chatter of songbirds and the gentle coo of doves. Hank doesn’t notice the quiet footfalls as they approach, but when he raises his bloodshot eyes he sees bare feet in the fresh dirt.

He looks up, weary, and doesn’t have the will to shout or fight anymore. The winged figure looks back, unmoving except the play of curls across his smooth forehead. 

“Why the fuck are you here,” Hank croaks. He’s still not convinced the man is real, but he’s too far beyond the point of caring to be worried about talking to figments of his imagination. “You took the only thing from me that was worth living for.”

“It wasn’t my choice,” the winged man says, voice a firm but softly pleasing rasp, like the wind rustling through tall grass. It raises the hair on the backs of Hank’s arms, so much that it hurts. “It was his time.”

“It should’ve been my time,” Hank says around the rough ache in his throat, jabbing a thumb into his chest. “It should’ve been me.”

“Your time will come, Hank,” the winged man says, more of a gentle observation than anything meant as a warning. “But not yet.”

He looks like he wants to say something else but turns away, fine profile briefly silhouetted there in the autumn light, and then with another rustle of feathers he’s gone.

Hank sits there, staring at his son’s initials carved in the new marble headstone, and doesn’t even question how the visitor knew his name.  
  


* * *  
  


Time passes in a boundless crawl, in the way that it does when you aren’t watching it too closely. Hank drinks. He thinks about dying. Picks up his gun a few times, stares down the barrel, sets it aside. Dumps the bullets on the table and counts them, reloads the chamber, then drinks some more.

Recovery isn’t something he pursues or embraces—it’s simply a word he thinks about from time to time in the abstract. Something that exists elsewhere in the world but has no weight or implication on his life. There will be no recovery. There is only moving through the empty husk of life until he finally collapses or stops.

He hasn’t taken Sumo for a walk in weeks, only stands in the doorway while the dog does his business in the yard and then whistles for him to come back in. It’s on one of these mornings, in some strange hour between midnight and dawn where Hank didn’t sleep, that he calls the dog in and then finds he can’t close the door because there’s a strong hand holding it open from the other side.

“What the fuck—?” Hank starts, suddenly alert despite the haze of alcohol coursing through his system. One of the lamps outside on the stoop has burned out and the one still burning lights up an eerily familiar shape, solid but narrow shoulders cloaked in a swath of darkness blacker than the moonless sky. Sumo stands behind him in the foyer, cowering backward with his tail between his legs. He doesn’t make a sound.

“What do you want from me?” Hank asks. His gun is on the kitchen table but somehow, he thinks, it probably won’t do much good. He tries to yank the door shut but it doesn’t budge an inch in the man’s easy grip, even though his eyes are cast somewhere to the side. “Fucking look at me when I’m talking to you.”

Brown eyes meet Hank’s blue ones, and even if they look human at first glance he knows they aren’t. Something lurks beneath the surface of those irises, something that makes his ears ring until they ache. He feels like he’s being scrubbed out from the inside, scoured by a pinch of endless fire until their gaze breaks off and the man in the threshold loosens his grip on the door.

“My name’s Connor,” he says. “I thought I’d come and formally introduce myself.”

Hank hangs there in his own front entryway, suddenly sober and exhausted enough that he leans away and lets the door creak open. “Hell of a way to do it,” he says, reaching up to scrub a hand over his face like there’s not something with a sixteen-foot wingspan standing on his stoop. “Maybe I don’t want to make introductions. Maybe I’d rather never see your face again.”

Connor looks more disappointed than hurt, like he’d been expecting this conversation to somehow go in a different direction. He rolls one shoulder and the corresponding wing on that side twitches as he does, mirroring a ghost of restlessness.

“I’ve been appointed as your guardian,” Connor says. “Even if you don’t see me, I’ll always be there. It seemed pointless to keep hiding from a man who thinks he has nothing left to lose.”

Hank laughs, empty and broken. “If I have nothing left to lose, what’s stopping me from shooting you on sight?”

Connor considers that for a brief moment. “I can’t die,” he says. “But you already knew that.” 

Behind him, the night seems to bend itself into a concave illusion, warped around Connor like a ripple cut into the fabric of reality. It’s barely noticeable, like heat coming up in waves off a blacktop baked by the summer son. A mirage in the lifeless desert of Hank’s life.

“Are you an angel?” he asks despite how foolish the question feels on his tongue.

“No,” Connor answers without pause. “Angels don’t dirty their hands with my line of work.”  
  
“Or a demon?” Hank tries again, trying not to sound hysterical.

Connor shakes his head. “Not quite. My associations are more ambiguous than that.”

“What the hell are you, then?” Hank asks, suddenly weary of this game where he asks a thousand questions gone unanswered. Has a century passed since he opened his front door? A minute? Half a second?

Connor smiles this time, deep enough that a dimple cuts into his left cheek. “It’s of no real consequence either way,” he says. “I’m simply whatever you would like me to be.”

Hank holds his gaze until his lungs begin to fill up with that brightness again, overflowing up into his throat like rising water, and then he looks away to draw in a shuddering breath. Steps aside and disappears into the house, leaving the door ajar.

Connor stands there for a long moment before raising a foot and drawing himself over the threshold. Sumo watches him from where he’s cowered down in the foyer, unmoving, and lets the newcomer pass by into the kitchen where Hank had gone a moment before.

Seated now at the kitchen table, Hank holds his loaded revolver parallel against the cheap wood atop a mess of mail and papers, finger poised and ready on the trigger.

“You never told me why you’re here,” Hank says. “Or what you need from me.”

“I don’t need anything,” Connor says, smoothing a hand own the thin material at his front. It’s hardly more than a shift, just a gossamer scrap of something meant to keep him modest. Another illusion that seems like a trick of the light depending on how you look.

Hank shakes his head, unimpressed. “Wrong answer. Everybody needs something. Everybody’s out for themselves.”

Connor thinks of the little boy with Hank’s eyes, the broken window, the black ice on the road. “I’m here to prevent you from taking your own life,” he says quietly. “It’s my sole mission as your guardian.”

“And?” Hank asks. “What if I don’t give a rat fuck about you or your mission?”

Even though they’re inside and the front door is shut, a cool draft seems to move through the room in the wake of those words. Connor tips his chin up and then to the side, and suddenly he has a shadow twice the size of the room, unending, like it exists in this world and then stretches further yet into another one entirely.

“You don’t have to care about me,” Connor says, and then takes a step forward. “But it’d be in your own best interest to be mindful of my duty, because if you don’t abide it I can’t take you to see your son, or your wife, in the place where they are. And I know that’s what _you_ want, Hank Anderson.”

The line of Hank’s throat moves in place but he doesn’t back down. “Sounds like an empty threat to me.”

Connor shrugs. “Is it worth the risk to find out for yourself?”

Hank is up out of the kitchen chair like a shot, moving with the kind of swiftness and fervor that shouldn’t be possible for a man of his sobriety and stature. He grabs Connor by the front of whatever shroud he’s wearing and twists it in his fist even as it scalds him like a hand laid on top of a hot iron stove.

“Tell me the fucking truth,” he hisses, bringing the gun up into Connor’s field of vision to brandish it there. “Tell me where you took him, you son of a bitch. I’ve got my one-way ticket and I’m ready to cash it in right here, right now.”

“We’ve already established that your weapon has no effect on me,” Connor says dryly. “Other than being a mild irritant I have no desire to deal with at the present moment.”

Hank’s jaw bulges from clenching it so tightly, but his breath comes in even, measured gusts through flared nostrils. Steady and depthless. So sure—so certain. Connor seems to realize what he’s going to do only a fraction of a second before it happens. But then again, perhaps he had always known, had been shaped with the knowing, and simply waited until the eleventh hour of the final day, using this last splintered moment like a bargaining chip of opportunity.

“This bullet’s not for you,” Hank says simply, and then presses the barrel under his chin and pulls the trigger.

There is a resounding blast as loud as old world thunder, but if a bullet leaves the chamber he never does find out. Hank feels himself dropping into a free fall, the kitchen floor beneath them yanked out from under his feet like a woven rug while the rest topples as if the whole house and everything beyond it is made from nothing more than chewing gum and building blocks. He thinks this must be what it’s like being threaded through the eye of a sewing needle, every ounce of matter in his body stretching into infinity all the way back to the empty beginning before the world exploded outward into existence and took its first rattling breath.

Then, past the gaping maw of obscurity, there’s nothing.

A thousand civilizations rise and crumble in the span of a blink, blown away like a single eyelash from the tip of a finger, and when Hank can draw air again into lungs that are no longer collapsed, there’s the warmth of a tender embrace, achingly gentle, holding him together while everything else falls apart.  
  


*  
  


When Hank opens his eyes again it’s dark.

He feels—cradled, maybe. Held. Cocooned in that same otherworldly sort of clutch from before, enclosed on every side. He blinks and recognizes, distantly, the feeling of hands pressed into the middle of his back, hotter than fired brands that somehow don’t hurt. When he tries to move there is a voice all around him, instantly familiar even though his ears ring from the weight of the world’s silence.

“You live,” Connor says, two words spoken somewhere at Hank’s temple. A pardon breathed out in a sigh.

There is the rustle of feathers, parting just enough to allow in the faintest ray of weak light, and Hank finally comprehends that he’s surrounded by wings. The great appendages unfurl and stretch, leaving him bare and exposed to what feels like the foggy chill of pre-dawn air. Connor is beneath him but far from trapped; despite everything, Hank feels like the one who has been caught and pinned into the cotton backing of a framed butterfly collection. Hank is the specimen ensnared beneath a pane of glass.

He has tears on his face, some wet and others already gone faintly tacky as they begin to dry. They’re both as naked as the day they were brought forth from creation and sprawled out on the dewy remnants of Hank’s overgrown front lawn.

With a groan, he rolls away from Connor and thuds onto his back, chest heaving even though he’s not winded. Not even a cricket chirps nearby, though Hank watches as a moth the size of his palm silently flutters by overhead, some greenish thing that almost glows in the night.

“You have a long life ahead of you,” Connor says resolutely, standing tall with his wings folded around him like a shroud once more. “I vowed your son that much. It would be remiss of me to break the only promise I ever made to a human.”

It takes Hank more than just a few moments to find his voice. He tries to sit up, slowly, fingers dug down into the earth until he feels dry warmth beneath the top layer of soil.

“What did you promise?” he asks. He knows that’s the only thing that matters. “What does Cole want me to do?”

Connor smiles modestly enough, austere features turned boyish and gentle.

“To be happy,” he says. “To continue onward with all your courage and strength.”

Hank squares his jaw and lets out a shaky breath, one grass-stained hand come up to wipe across his eyes and down through his beard. “What if I can’t?” he asks.

“You can,” Connor says, reaching out to lightly touch his temple until all the remaining fear and tension feels like it’s being bled from their singular point of contact, drawn from Hank’s skull in a silk thread. “And you will. I think that’s much better than any alternative, don’t you?” 

A car passes in the distance, the first thing Hank’s heard beyond their voices and his own pounding heartbeat in what feels like a small eon.

“You’ll take me to see him,” he says. It’s not a question. “Cole and—his mother.”

“One day,” Connor says.

“One day,” Hank echoes.

The both look toward the eastern sky in silence, watching as the first shard of new day wraps its fingers over the lip of the horizon and begins to climb.  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> We're on twitter! 
> 
> @honkforhankcon  
@rk8inches


End file.
